Drive growth through innovation even if it’s only in the finance department

Cognitive surplus has proven gold dust for other departments. It’s about time you benefit from it in the finance department too.

Go beyond the obviousThe typical financial processes that businesses can employ to drive growth are fairly obvious: cutting into the bottom line, maximising revenues at the top line, and calculating the return on investment (ROI) for any new investment opportunities. But ‘innovation time’, along with financial analysis, can provide an opportunity to seek out less traditional levers to drive growth.

Not a particularly glamorous taskEnsuring real time away from the stressful daily “to-do’s” can prove a valuable exercise. Real time away to reflect, to pin down insights on the demands, the unsatisfactory deliveries etc. can help you analyse the performance of your finance department in the past versus the demands, deliveries and performance of today. By tapping this cognitive surplus, you and your colleagues may discover areas that are limiting, and which might limit your financial performance tomorrow.

With your financial performance analysis in place you can better forecast and plan departmental budgets, while providing a firm foundation from which to review any innovative ideas to change the business structure helping to change the performance/cost ratio in positive direction.

Want a push in the right directionWant a good push in the right direction, so you really can improve the performance of your finance department?

You probably have the same gut feeling that was brought to consciousness by the Adra Match survey of the financial close process: only 28% of financial staff trust the reported numbers in the month end financial close Tweet this stat, making historical account analysis an even more arduous task. Get the easy-to-grasp financial close benchmark survey results here.

Adra Match BALANCER makes the entire financial close process faster and more efficient by integrating automatic account reconciliation with automated approval workflows. The overview dashboard makes strict compliance the standard for your team, while executives can be accurately kept in the loop with drill-down reports at the touch of a button. You can also do away with binders and make your historical analysis quicker and easier with the fully digital archive. What’s more, because of all these efficiencies BALANCER can actually help to create ‘innovation time’ within the financial department, helping to create a virtuous cycle of improvements and innovations.

In fact, Adra Match’s enhanced balance sheet reconciliation software BALANCER is the product of a value constellation itself, an important part of tapping into your cognitive surplus. It has been built with input from our front-line staff, customer feedback and on the back of the above mentioned survey of financial staff from across Europe and America.